> A war continuous until one side has caused the other more suffering than it can take.
The article is in large parts about how that's not true. It makes the point that the very existence of the Iranian regime hinges on its opposition to the US, to capitulate would mean for the leaders to lose all support, be overthrown and likely die: so there's no level of suffering that it "can't take anymore". And similar in the US, the leadership cannot survive politically to a capitulation. Hence endless escalation on both sides.
The Iranian regime is unlikely to capitulate fully. They don't want to end up like Syria and Lebanon, where Israel can just bomb them at will.
Trump has more flexibility. Really all he needs is an endpoint that FOX News is willing to describe as a US victory. He cares more about image and perception than reality. So, in that space, there is probably room for some negotiated outcome.
Adding they can hang out in bunkers that are 500 meters under the mountains for decades. US leadership come and go every few years and they know it. They need only wait them out. There are no bunker busters or nukes in existence that I am aware of that can do anything to the missile cities. I would love to be proven wrong by their actions ideally without sacrificing 15k ground troops which I believe is the current count on the ground not counting the 50k naval forces.
you miss the asymmetry here:
If there's a country goes thousands miles from far away to invade the US, then American can endure much more to fight than the invading country. The balance will be the opposit.
The often missing asymmetry reflects something deep in the mindset of large portion of western population.
Yes, this is definitely a way to gain leadership that is more amenable. There definitely has not been any historical cases of one country inflecting mass suffering on another country’s innocent population for the other to hold.. let’s say a strong grudge against the aggressor.
And there are cases like Vietnam that are USA best buddies now. And a lot of people that grew on a morning brew of agent orange and napalm are in their leadership now.
I think Iran gaining nukes and a strong military and reduction of US interest in Israel would mostly solve the problems. It will cause a balancing of power and Israel less willing to start random wars and violence. Iran will be a shitty country to its own people as always of course but the Israel csused chaos would mostly be reduced a lot.
Alternately Israels nukes are made legal and decommissionied and or brought to neutral third parties for safekeeping, that would significantly reduce the incentive for its neighbors to want to make nukes. As long as israel has nukes, its neighbors would never feel safe without and keep trying to build nukes.
Edit: Sometimes the only answer to the weaker side claiming that something is impossible is Vae Victis. I am sure that there are enough powerful people in Iran that wouldn't mind secular state if they are the one to lead it. It is not as if their kids are not wild partying in europe anyway.
Once again - it is impossible for a very select few. There are a lot of generals that could stage a coup. Or colonels. They just summary execute those above them and say new rules bitches.
TFA argues that the Iranian regime works "bottom up", and there's no "select few" group of leaders that can be removed or changed that would topple the regime or make it change course. TFA argues that the US fundamentally misread the situation (it also argues that Israel didn't misread it but also doesn't care what happens in Iran, they just want to destabilize it for short-term gains, mainly benefiting Netanyahu; but that this war is also a mistake for Israel longer term).
> The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime where the core centers of power (like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) are ‘bought in’ from the bottom to the top because the regime allows them access to disproportionate resources and power. Consequently if you blow up the leader, they will simply pick another one [...]
> But power in the Iranian regime isn’t wielded by the Supreme Leader alone either: the guardian council has power, the council of experts that select the Supreme Leader have power, the IRGC has power, the regular military has some power (but less than the IRGC), the elected government has some power (but less than the IRGC or the guardian council) and on and on.
And this bunch of people cannot easily change course, TFA convincingly argues, because:
> And so that is the trap. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.
So they cannot yield power and they cannot stand down because their whole legitimacy (of sorts) rests on being belligerent towards Israel and the US. If they flinch, the worst case scenario for them is to lose power and get killed.
TFA calls this a "trap" for both the US and Iran. It's a situation they are locked in now, both sides forced to escalate because backing down spells political doom for whoever does it, but escalating is still bad for both of them.
> Once again there is no regime in which military coup by those in the middle is impossible.
Just very unlikely in this case. TFA explains its case and why yours is very unlikely; while you're just repeating your opinion based on faith ("once again"), with no analysis and no demonstrable knowledge of the specifics.
> And my solution still remains viable - returning their tech tree to pre WWI levels will defang them no matter their power structure
TFA explains why this isn't feasible without massive loss of life and dollars spent, and furthermore, it also explains why keeping the Strait open and low risk is unfeasible without boots on the ground (not just strikes from the skies), which, in turn, would be very costly for the US in Iran. I mean, all of this is addressed in the article.
Related anecdote: My 12yo son didn't like the speed cubing online timer he was using because it kept crashing the browser and interrupted him with ads. Instead of googling a better alternative we sat down with claude code and put together the version of the website that behaved and looked exactly as he wanted. He got it working all by himself in under an hour with less than 10 prompts, I only helped a bit putting it online with github pages so he can use it from anywhere.
Turns out that knowing what a plain text file is will be the criterion that distinguishes users who are digitally free from those locked into proprietary platforms.
Many parents are extremely interested in quickly building digital tools for their kids (education and entertainment) that they know are free from advertising, social media integration, user monitoring etc.
That may be true. But you also have to give the average parent more credit by assuming they don't want tech companies spying on their children and forcing their toxic platforms on them.
There are well attended parent evenings in our school on that topic.
Thinking about it, we should turn these into vibe coding hackathons where we replace all the ad-ridden little games, learning tools, messengers we don't like with healthy alternatives.
Yes, because the current software paradigm (a shed/barn/warehouse full of tools to suite every possible users every possible need) doesn't make sense when LLMs can turn plain English into a software tool in the matter of minutes.
>LLMs can turn plain English into a software tool in the matter of minutes.
Unless LLMs can read minds, no one will bother to specify, even in plain english with the required level of detail. And that is assuming the user has the details in mind, which is also something pretty improbable...
You need to think outside the box a little. They're not going to need to write a requirements doc from scratch. They'll tell it to copy a piece of software which is already established and make some customisations or improvements based on their needs. This is a few sentences.
yes. claude added a suggested random scramble (if that's what you mean?), also running average of 5/12/100, local storage of past times on first iteration, my son told it to also add a button for +2s penalties and touch screen support.
Ok cool! I have not done any cubing related coding so I don't know how complicated it gets but making sure suggested scrambles are solvable etc seems like it could be non-trivial?
I dont want that though, I want someone to spend much more time than I can afford thinking about and perfecting a product that I can pay for and dont worry about it
In the next few years it's going to be quicker to tell an AI to make something than it will take to hunt down software which fits all your uses perfectly. If you're honest, all software is imperfect for you. It's not customised exactly how you like it. Imagine if it could be exactly what you want with zero effort.
And some people do, both things can be true. I'd rather make a tool just for me that breaks when I introduce a new requirement and I just add into it and keep going.
The statement wasn't: "no one ever vibe codes an alternative to product X"
It was: "With sufficiently advanced vibe coding the need for certain type of product just vanishes."
If a product has 100 thousand users and 1% of them vibe codes an alternative for themselves, the product / business doesn't vanish. They still have 99 thousand of users.
That was the rebuttal, even if not presented as persuasively and intelligently as I just did.
So no, it's not the case of "both things being true". It's a case of: he was wrong.
At some point there will be market consequences for that kind of behavior. So where market dynamics are not dominated by bullshit (politics, friendships forged on Little St James, state intervention, cartel behavior, etc.) if my company provides the same service as another, but I replaced all of the low quality software as a service products my competitor uses with low quality vibe coded products, my overhead cost will be lower and that will give me an advantage.
I built a jira with attachments and all sorts of bells and whistles. Purrs like a kitten. Saas are going extinct. At least the jobs that charged $1000 a day to write jira plugins.
Some minor UX enhancement SaaS of the most recent VC-funded wave will do. Maybe those who forgot how to invest in R&D and spent last 20 years just fixing bugs. There’s plenty of SaaS on the market that offers added value beyond the code. Data brokers. Domain experts, etc. Even if homemade solution is sometimes possible, initial development costs are going to be just one of several important factors in choosing whether to build or to buy.
SaaS are not going exctinct. This reminds me of the LinkedIn posts saying they clone Slack in two hours, copying the UI, etc. Yeah, if you think Slack is private chat rooms then you should use IRC for your company.
One of the most valuable things about Slack is the ecosystem: apps, API support, etc. If you need to receive notifications from external apps (like PageDuty or Incident.io or something like that), good luck expecting them having a setup for your own version of the app. Yeah, some of them provide webhooks (not all of them), but in the end you have to maintain that too...
Yes, it seems like it got to some tipping point around 2013 where so many product and management people were familiar with it, and from there it became this “industry standard” that management always wanted everyone to use.
Also though, I feel like being attached to Confluence helped it because there is a lot less competition in the world of documentation wikis than there is in task management.
Products where the only value was the code are definitely under pressure. But, how many products are really like that? I suggest everyone look up HALO that’s so popular in investing right now, and start looking at companies with the assumption that the value of the code is zero so what other value is there. There’s often a lot more there than people realize.
How many products are actually like that? If I could easily replace github, datadog/sentry/whatever, cloudflare, aws, tailscale that would be great. In my view building and owning is better than buying or renting. Especially when it comes to data--it would be much better for me to own my telemetry data for example than to ship it off to another company. But I don't think you (or anyone) will be vibecoding replacements for these services anytime soon. They solve big, hard, difficult problems.
Github is on the chopping block as a tool (it's sticky as a social network). The other stuff not so much.
The things that are going away are tools that provide convenience on top of a workflow that's commoditized. Anything where the commercial offering provides convenience rather than capabilities over the open source offerings is gonna get toasted.
Even at recent levels of uptime I think it would be very difficult to build a competing product that could function at the scale of even a small company (10 engineers). How would you implement Actions? Code review comments/history? Pull requests? Issues? Permalinks? All of these things have serious operational requirements. If you just want some place to store a git repository any filesystem you like will do it but when you start talking about replacing github that's a different story altogether and TBH I don't think building something that appears to function the same is even the hard part, it's the scaling challenges you run into very quickly.
The future is narrow bespoke apps custom tailored for exactly that one single users use case.
An example would be if the user only ever works with .jpg files, then you don't need to support any of the dozens of other formats an image program would support.
I cannot stress enough how many software users out there are only using 1-10% of a program's capability, yet they have to pay for a team of devs who maintain 100% of it.
"The future" is fiction. It's a blank canvas where you can make a fingerpainting of any fantasy you like. Whenever people tell me about "the future" I know they're talking absolute rubbish. And I also like your fantasy! But it probably won't happen.
I call it "Psychics for Programmers." People will scoff at psychics and fortune telling and palm reading, but then the same people will listen to Elon or some founder or VC and be utterly convinced that that person is a visionary and can describe the future.
It's just reading the room. People hate having to use their computers through the lens of quasi-robot humans (saying that as one of those robots). They hate having to pay monthly just so dumb features and UI overhauls can be pushed on them.
They just want the software to do the few things they need it to do. AI labs are falling over themselves to remove the gate keeping regular people from using their computing device the way they want to use it. And the progress there in the last few years is nothing short of absolutely astounding.
> the progress there in the last few years is nothing short of absolutely astounding
Yet, all the astounding progress notwithstanding, I don't have a suite of bespoke tools replacing the ones I depend on. I cannot say "hey claude, make me a suite of bespoke software infrastructure monitoring and operational tooling tailored to my specific needs" and expect anything more than a giant headache and wasted time. So maybe we just need to wait? Or maybe it's just not actually real. My view is unless you show me a working demo it's vaporware. Show me that the problem is solved, don't tell me that it might be solved later sometime.
And what exactly is preventing you from building bespoke software for "infrastructure monitoring and operational tooling tailed to your specific needs"?
I could certainly imagine building myself some sort of dashboard. It would seem like a prime use case.
You want to hear about a problem solved? Recently I extended a tool that snaps high resolution images to a Pixel art grid, adding a GUI. I added features to remove the background, to slice individual assets out of it automatically, and to tile them in 9-slice mode.
Could I have realistically implemented the same bespoke tool before AI? No.
> And what exactly is preventing you from building bespoke software for "infrastructure monitoring and operational tooling tailed to your specific needs"?
Let's say I emit roughly 1TB of telemetry data per day--logs, metrics, etc. That's roughly what you might expect from medium sized tech company or a specific department (say, security) at a large company. There is going to be a significant infrastructure investment to replicate datadog's function in my organization, even if I only use a small subset of their product. It's not just "building a dashboard" it's building all the infrastructure to collect, normalize, store, and retrieve the data to even be able to draw that dashboard.
The dashboard is the trivial part. The hard part is building, operating, and maintaining all the infrastructure. Claude doesn't do a very good job helping with this, and in some sense it actually hinders.
EDIT: I'm not saying you shouldn't take ownership of your telemetry data. I think that's a strategically (and potentially from a user's perspective) better end result. But it is a mistake to trivialize the effort of that undertaking. Claude is not going to vibeslop it for you.
I agree, that does not seem like a smart undertaking. I was thinking more of a dashboard within the existing software, or above it.
For my use case I wanted bespoke software to work with Pixel art, but obviously I would not try to build Photoshop or Aseprite from scratch. I needed only specific functionality and I was able to build that in a way fitting my workflow better than any existing software could.
I was able to build it with Claude Code and Codex. Maybe the implementation is sloppy, I did not care to check. The program works, and it's like a side project to my side project. It would not have been possible in the past, I would have needed to work with what Aseprite offers out of the box.
This is a pipe dream and “sufficiently advanced” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. You really think people would rather spin up and debug their own self-made software rather than pay for something that has been tested, debugged, and proven by thousands of users? Why would anyone do that for anything more than a very simple script? It makes zero sense unless the LLM outputs literally perfect one-shot software reliably.
Perplexity just launched a tool that builds and hosts small bespoke tools.
I tried it works wells. I can do the same thing in my Linux machine, but even my 12 year old now can get perplexity to build him a tool to compare ram prices at different chinease vendors.
In which case, if LLMs can perfectly one shot simple programs, creating and maintaining a really advanced program would presumably be very cheap since it could just one shot every feature. So instead of generating new image editing programs for every task, why not pay $10/month for the guy who spent a week guiding an LLM into making ultra photoshop with every feature Ill ever need?
Photoshop is a good example -- not that I agree with everything in the app, but just to design all the interactions properly in photoshop would take hundreds of hours (not to mention testing and figuring out the edges). If your goal is a 1-to-1 clone why not use Krita or photoshop? With LLM you'll get "mostly there" with many many hours of work, and lots of sharp edges. If all you need is paint bucket, basic brush / pencil, and save/load, ok maybe you can one-shot it in a few hours... or just use paint / aesprite...
A certain kind of mind deals with stress by devising solutions, even if one cannot put them into action.
Seeing people in Israel, Iran, the general Middle East as well as the Ukraine live in fear of drone strikes might have incentivised this person to come up with a potential way to deal with these threats.
Cheap air defense would equilibrate drone warfare again:
Currently drones are much cheaper that the systems that take them down.
The fact that home made drones can cause such havoc to even the best funded military is an equalizer when the military with all the power is actively trying to completely eliminate the otherside.
There are no home made devices a Gazan can build that can protect from a 2000lbs bomb.
MANPADS can be effective against large drones, but definitely not against the kind of FOV shit we see in Ukraine. They were originally designed to kill helicopters and low flying aircraft, and I'm guessing that's still his design intent.
So far russia launched over 57 000 Iranian/inspired shahed drones. They are like 6ft long drones with 40+ lbs payload with couple hundreds of miles of range.
USA/NATO/allies heavily rely on Patriot AA system.
Even if you disregard the prohibitive 100x cost difference, there are about 2500 Patriot compatible PAC missiles.
This is why gulf states are scrambling to get their hands on cheap alternatives - Ukraine manages to shoot down over 90% of all drones heading their way, usually it is over 400 per day in big waves.
They are but the Ukrainians are making some serious inroads into the effectiveness of those drones and if they keep that up for a little while longer they will have near perfect ability to shoot them down. Essentially they've built hunter-killer drones that are sent off in the general direction of Shahed that then either succeed or fail in their mission. That success rate has been very steadily climbing over the last couple of months.
Ukraine has been incredibly restrained given the atrocities perpetrated on them. To the point that during the Kursk incursion the residents preferred the Ukrainians over their own countryfolk.
But I really hate the whole weaponization of these FPV drones (as opposed to the bigger fixed wings ones), not just they ruined the fun hobby that a lot enjoy, but also increased the prices for the parts. Before 2022 whenever I talk about drones everyone is enthusiastic about them, what benefits they can bring like drone deliveries and all, after that, you get a hostile reaction or the government putting you on some watchlist.
That's not true at all, the success rates of these fpv drones are around 1 to 100, ie out of 100 failed attempt you get a hit, but you only see the successful ones, and those aren't my words, this is straight up from a Canadian soldier in Ukraine (1). And you can actually ask any hobbyist, they will tell you how prone to failure/crashes/loss these fpv small drones are, after all, they are meant to be for fun.
I wasn't talking about the success rate for any individual drone, but about the cumulative effect. And the success rate of individual missions depends very strongly on which part of the front you are looking at and what kind of missions are flown.
Just to give you one figure: estimates are that between 1000 and 1500 Shaheds have been downed by interceptors during last February. That's not a 100% kill rate but it definitely isn't 1% either. And they're getting better every week.
A PhD at a research focused experimental institution creates a particular kind of human that is absurdly resistant to stress and despair:
Ask an x-ray physicist using DESY about the horrors of “Beam Time” or a chemist about crystallising proteins.
Most people I know don’t use their actual skills anymore, but all of them shrug off whatever you throw at them at work without blinking.
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